The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.

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We still seem to be getting the occasional spammer dropping in. Do you think it would be a good idea to enable admin account verification? Basically this means I would have to approve everyone before they can post. I'm not sure if I want to go that route though.

I have a phpBB too. The only thingso far as I can tell that it does is keep spammers from posting. They still wind up in your memberlist and you have to go and delete them manually. Dunno why the folks at phpBB haven't come up with a way to deal with it.

The problem I have had is not with spammers posting, but somehow their bots jack my bandwidth by using my domain email address to do their dirty work. Might wanna keep an eye on your bandwidth usage.

There are a number of mods and hacks available that address the problem at:

but after reading through their message boards, it seems that this is a widespread problem with phpBB and none of the mods and hacks seem to do a 100% fix on the problem. I guess about the time they fix something the bottom feeders invent a new way to take what isn't theirs...

I'm starting to consider that myself. Although I do have a Geeklog blog and I have so far had no exploit attempts (knock on wood). There is a BB add in module for it, that I am looking at really closely.

I read in another thread that this site was being upgraded in order to include subfolders. Is that the Categories and Hierarchies Mod? If so I would be interested in how that goes, especially what SQL changes need to be made. I downloaded it and have been thinking about doing it, but so far I'm too bigga chicken....

Oh no nothing like that...what I mean by subfoolders is that the forums will no longer be in the root of the website. Right now the phpbb's index.php is at the root level of the hosting account. I'm going to move it to a forums subdirectory so I can have a more dynamic and potentially useful homepage.

I intend to create a root level page that uses the phpbb's rss feed to highlight certain things...its still going to be driven by the forums, and the forums will continue to be the main reason to visit the site. But I'm goign to try and make a more welcoming homepage.

Imagine a featured map or some other featured something or other on the homepage that's pulled straight from the forums...A panel that shows and links to the last 5 posts, most popular posts, etc. All accessible on the homepage.

As for spammers...I looked at a few of the mods yesterday...Confusabot for example. But I don't think that would buy me anything, because after checking my bandwidth I don't think I'm being abused by bots or automated systems...yet.

That actually looks like it might be worth giving a whirl. Just about all the bogus signups use the free poker email addy's and a dead blogspot site. I tried filtering them through phpBB's admin, but it's pretty lame. I bookmarked this mod, an I think I might give er a go. Thanks for posting it!

I've currently modified th eboard to hide the website textbox on the registration screen, and if a website is submitted (can only be filled via bot) then the registration is denied. Perhaps this may stem the tides, and it was easy ti install...no files, just editing.